The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

This Century

Maybe, if I had a choice,
I would remember no one,
But walk on the frail water
over the floating floors
of a madhouse

-Larry Levis

Maybe this madhouse
is the one I’ve been swimming
toward all month—month of
the anniversaries of Stonewall and
Judy Garland both saying no
more, no more of this
please, June. So
I spend an hour poring
over this poem, its strange
movements from story to sad
memory, its soft announcements
of great truths, its visit to Ireland
and then its ending of sky.
If I had a choice,
I would sit down with
Larry and ask him what one
thing was daggered into him that
day he wrote it, and did he
get it out? But he was gone
before I even owned
this book, even
before I first read it
which was with a different copy,
library copy hard-backed and
jacketless with a single
snowflake imprint
on its front
though the title said
Stars not Snow, but Larry, you
could pull tricks like that, like say
stars and snow are the same
and everyone believed you
which must have felt
very strange.
To build a madhouse
for yourself out of moths
and train smoke and then all these
strangers show up saying
Thanks for the invite!
and it’s true their
faces are not
any you remember
but they seem to know yours
which is an ache that’s even sharper
than wanting to forget the ones
you worry you didn’t cherish
enough, though of course
you did, Larry.
You stood
in a barroom with
beautiful lunatics and sang
your own Over the Rainbow and
I only wish I’d been there.
This century sucks.
Everyone is
a memory.

The Night of the Ghost

Gardenia hasn’t hung this heavy
in years. And I bet the lightning bugs
will be back sooner than usual.
Ever since the city shut down
the noise above their ground nests
has so diminished they’ll think they’re
waking up within countryside calm.
Last summer I holed up in a house
in the dense woods upstate and
watched a square ghost fold in on
itself—geometric specter on
the rough face of a big oak. I was
there to make poems, but I
made myself crazy instead, chasing
and trapping big insects all day
only to return them to the outside
world they’d snuck free from—wasps
and beetles who crept in through
cracks in the doors and window frames,
anywhere warped wood pulled away
from where it once lined up flush.
The night of the ghost, I didn’t sleep
because a dozen fireflies crawled in, one
by one through an opening around
the window AC. So maybe I was
seeing things, some glow of a world
I didn’t belong to, like them: In the pitch
dark, the temperature panel burned
lime-bright, a false beckoning.
Then the ghost made itself smaller
and smaller against the tree until
it was gone. All those days, all
the days and nights since, and all
I’ve written down to describe it are 
these two swift sentences: 
The animals take their turn.
The wind has never smelled this sweet.

ELLY BOOKMAN‘s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the first annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review and the Loraine Williams poetry prize from The Georgia Review. Her first collection, Love Sick Century, will be published by 42 Miles Press in 2024.

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